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Girls and Software

December 2013's EOF, titled "Mars Needs Women", visited an interesting
fact: that the male/female ratio among Linux Journal readers, and Linux
kernel
developers, is so lopsided (male high, female low) that graphing it would
produce a near-vertical line. I was hoping the piece would invite a Linux
hacker on the female side of that graph to step up and move the
conversation
forward. And sure enough, here we have Susan Sons aka @HedgeMage. Read
on.—Doc Searls

Yep, I said "girls". Since men were once boys, but women sprang from
the head of Zeus full-grown and fighting like modern-day Athenas, you
can start flaming me now for using that nasty word...unless you'd like
to see the industry through the eyes of a girl who grew up to be a woman
in the midst of a loose collection of open-source communities.

Looking around at the hackers I know, the great ones started before
puberty. Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm
clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios.
Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains. I started coding
when I was six years old, sitting in my father's basement office, on
the machine he used to track inventory for his repair service. After a
summer of determined trial and error, I'd managed to make some gorillas
throw things other than exploding bananas. It felt like victory!

When I was 12, I got my hands on a Slackware disk and installed it on my
computer—a Christmas gift from my parents in an especially good year
for my dad's company—and I found a bug in a program. The program was
in C, a language I'd never seen. I found my way onto IRC and explained
the predicament: what was happening, how to reproduce it and where I
thought I'd found the problem.

I was pretty clueless then—I hadn't even realized that the reason I
couldn't read the code well was that there was more than one programming
language in the world—but the channel denizens pointed me to the
project's issue tracker, explained its purpose and helped me file my
first bug report.

What I didn't find out about until later was the following private message
exchange between one of the veterans who'd been helping me and a channel
denizen who recognized my nickname from a mailing list:

coder0: That was a really well-asked question...but why do I get the feeling
he's a 16yo boy?

coder1: Because she's a 12yo girl.

coder0: Well...wow. What do her parents do that she thinks like that?

coder1: I think she's on a farm somewhere, actually.

When coder1 told me about the conversation, I was sold on open source.
As a little girl from farm country who'd repeatedly been excluded from
intellectual activities because she wasn't wealthy or urban or old
enough to be wanted, I could not believe how readily I'd been accepted
and treated like anybody else in the channel, even though I'd been outed.
I was doubly floored when I found out that coder0 was none other than Eric
S. Raymond, whose writings I'd devoured shortly after discovering Linux.

Open source was my refuge because it was a place were nobody cared what
my pedigree was or what I looked like—they cared only about what I
did.
I ingratiated myself to people who could help me learn by doing dull
scutwork: triaging issues to keep the issue queues neat and orderly,
writing documentation and fixing code comments. I was the helpful kid,
so when I needed help, the community was there. I'd never met another
programmer in real life at this point, but I knew more about programming
than some college students.

It Really Is about Girls (and Boys)

Twelve-year-old girls today don't generally get to have the experiences
that I did. Parents are warned to keep kids off the computer lest they
get lured away by child molesters or worse—become fat! That goes
doubly for girls, who then grow up to be liberal arts majors. Then,
in their late teens or early twenties, someone who feels the gender skew
in technology communities is a problem drags them to a LUG meeting or an
IRC channel. Shockingly, this doesn't turn the young women into hackers.

Why does anyone, anywhere, think this will work? Start with a young
woman who's already formed her identity. Dump her in a situation that
operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of
people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell
her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have
enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you
can feel good about recruiting a female. This is a recipe for failure.

Young women don't magically become technologists at 22.
Neither do young men. Hackers are born in childhood, because that's
when the addiction to solving the puzzle or building something kicks in
to those who've experienced that "victory!" moment like I had when I imposed
my will on a couple electronic primates.

Unfortunately, our society has set girls up to be anything but
technologists. My son is in elementary school. Last year, his school
offered a robotics class for girls only. When my son asked why he
couldn't join, it was explained to him that girls need special help
to become interested in technology, and that if there are boys around, the
girls will be too scared to try.

My son came home very confused. You see, he grew up with a mom who
coded while she breastfed and brought him to his first LUG meeting at
age seven weeks. The first time he saw a home-built robot, it was shown
to him by a local hackerspace member, a woman who happens to administer
one of the country's biggest supercomputers. Why was his school acting
like girls were dumb?

There's another place in my life, besides my home, where the idea
of technology being a "guy thing" is totally absent: my hometown.
I still visit Sandridge School from time to time, most recently when my
old math teacher invited me in to talk to students about STEM careers.
I'm fairly sure I'm the only programmer anyone in that town has met in
person...so I'm something of the archetypal computer geek as far as they
are concerned. If anything, some folks assume that it's a "girl
thing".

Still, I don't see the area producing a bunch of female hackers.
The poverty, urbanization and rising crime aside, girls aren't being
raised to hack any more in my hometown than they are anywhere else.
When I talked to those fifth-grade math classes, the boys told me about
fixing broken video game systems or rooting their phones. The girls
didn't do projects—they talked about fashion or seeking
popularity—not building things.

What's Changed?

I've never had a problem with old-school hackers. These guys treat me
like one of them, rather than "the woman in the group", and many are old
enough to remember when they worked on teams that were about one third women,
and no one thought that strange. Of course, the key word here is
"old"
(sorry guys). Most of the programmers I like are closer to my father's
age than mine.

The new breed of open-source programmer isn't like the old. They've
changed the rules in ways that have put a spotlight on my sex for the
first time in my 18 years in this community.

When we call a man a "technologist", we mean he's a programmer, system
administrator, electrical engineer or something like that. The same used
to be true when we called a woman a "technologist". However, according
to the new breed, a female technologist might also be a graphic designer
or someone who tweets for a living. Now, I'm glad that there are social
media people out there—it means I can ignore that end of
things—but putting them next to programmers makes being a
"woman in tech"
feel a lot like the Programmer Special Olympics.

It used to be that I was comfortable standing side by side with men, and
no one cared how I looked. Now I find myself having to waste time talking
about my gender rather than my technology...otherwise, there are lectures:

The "you didn't have a woman on the panel" lecture. I'm on the panel, but I'm
told I don't count because of the way I dress: t-shirt, jeans, boots, no
make-up.

The "you desexualize yourself to fit in; you're oppressed!" lecture. I'm told
that deep in my female heart I must really love make-up and fashion. It's not
that I'm a geek who doesn't much care how she looks.

The "you aren't representing women; you'd be a better role model for girls if
you looked the part" lecture. Funny, the rest of the world seems very busy
telling girls to look fashionable (just pick up a magazine or walk down the
girls' toy aisle). I don't think someone as bad at fashion as I am should
worry about it.

With one exception, I've heard these lectures only from women, and
women who can't code at that. Sometimes I want to shout "you're not a
programmer, what are you doing here?!"

I've also come to realize that I have an advantage that female newcomers
don't: I was here before the sexism moral panic started. When a dozen
guys decide to drink and hack in someone's hotel room, I get invited.
They've known me for years, so I'm safe. New women, regardless
of competence, don't get invited unless I'm along. That's a sexual
harassment accusation waiting to happen, and no one will risk having 12
men alone with a single woman and booze. So the new ladies get left out.

I've never been segregated into a "Women in X" group, away
from the real action in a project. I've got enough clout
to say no when I'm told I should be loyal and spend my time
working on women's groups instead of technology. I'm not
young or impressionable enough to listen to the likes of the Ada
Initiative who'd have me passive-aggressively
redcarding anyone who
bothers me or feeling like every male is a threat, or that every social
conflict I have is because of my sex.

Here's a news flash for you: except for the polymaths in the group,
hackers are generally kind of socially inept. If someone of any
gender does something that violates my boundaries, I assume it was
a misunderstanding. I calmly and specifically explain what bothered
me and how to avoid crossing that boundary, making it a point to let
the person know that I am not upset with them, I just want to make sure
they're aware so it doesn't happen again. This is what adults do, and
it works. Adults don't look for ways to take offense, silently hand out
"creeper cards" or expect anyone to read their minds. I'm not a child,
I'm an adult, and I act like one.

My Boobs Don't Matter

I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community
where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs.
That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say
they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more
than boobs.

There aren't very many girls who want to hack. I imagine this has a
lot to do with the fact that girls are given fashion dolls and make-up
and told to fantasize about dating and popularity, while boys are given
LEGOs and tool sets and told to do something. I imagine it has a lot to
do with the sort of women who used to coo "but she could be so pretty if
only she didn't waste so much time with computers". I imagine it has
a lot to do with how girls are sold on ephemera—popularity, beauty
and fitting in—while boys are taught to revel in accomplishment.

Give me a young person of any gender with a hacker mentality, and I'll make
sure they get the support they need to become awesome. Meanwhile,
buy your niece or daughter or neighbor girl some LEGOs and teach her to
solder. I love seeing kids at LUG meetings and hackerspaces—bring them!
There can never be too many hackers.

Do not punish the men simply for being here. "Male privilege" is a way
to say "you are guilty because you don't have boobs, feel ashamed, even
if you did nothing wrong", and I've wasted too much of my time trying to
defend good guys from it. Yes, some people are jerks. Call them out as
jerks, and don't blame everyone with the same anatomy for their behavior.
Lumping good guys in with bad doesn't help anyone, it just makes good
guys afraid to interact with women because they feel like they can't win.
I'm tired of expending time and energy to protect good men from this
drama.

Do not punish hackers for non-hackers' shortcomings. It is not my fault
some people don't read man pages, nor is it my job to hold their hand
step-by-step so they don't have to. It is not my place to drag grown
women in chains to LUG meetings and attempt to brainwash them to make you
more comfortable with the gender ratio, and doing so wouldn't work anyway.

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared
what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they
cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven.
At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

I remember in those early days, in my haven, if someone was rude or
tried to bully me, the people around me would pounce with a resounding
"How dare you be mean to someone we
like!" Now, if a man behaves
badly, we're bogged down with a much more complex thought process:
"Did this happen because she's a woman?" "Am I white knighting if I
step in?" "Am I a misogynist if I don't?" "What does this say about
women in technology?" "Do I really want to be part of another gender
politics mess?" It was so much simpler when we didn't analyze so much,
and just trounced on mean people for being mean.

Susan Sons' passion for education has driven her open-source efforts with Debian Edu, Edubuntu and her own initiative Frog and Owl, which helps technologists connect with educators to build more useful educational tools. She co-authored the first edition of The Edubuntu Handbook and The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7. Susan has served as a staff member for the Freenode network and founding president of Drupal Group Indianapolis. She designed and implemented a program to help preteens and teens from under-resourced rural communities learn computer science through experimentation and open-source contribution. When not coding or writing, Susan can be found studying Shorei Goju-Ryu Karate, backpacking and geocaching with her son, and volunteering with abuse victims and at-risk populations. She is also an amateur radio operator.